Hello everyone! This is just a short post since I plan on relaxing today to wish everyone a prosperous and happy lunar new year! This year is the year of the horse!

A popular expression in Chinese for the New Year is long ma jing sheng or may you have the energy and vitality of the horse and the dragon! Since this is a skating blog, here are two skaters who have given their discipline a great vitality through their rivalry. And they were born in the year of the horse!

Let’s hope they both skate well and give us a heck of a competition in Sochi!

It’s Throwback Thursday time! Each Thursday until the Sochi Olympics, I will feature a skater or a program from the last Olympic season. This is the 5th and second last post. Wah! The Olympic games start in a week!

This week’s Throwback Thursday features Joannie Rochette, who has one of the most touching and poignant stories from the last Olympics. For those who may not have paid attention to the last Olympics or forgot, Joannie’s mother passed away days before Joannie competed in Vancouver. However, despite the pain, Joannie found the courage to skate and win the bronze medal in the ladies event. In the hearts of many Canadians and fans though, the true colour of Joannie’s medal was gold for finding the strength to skate so well after her tragic loss.

Truth be told, I wasn’t a huge fan of Joannie’s more clunky, athletic skating style – I tend to prefer skaters with graceful lines, flexibility and extension. However, this performance blew me away – her jumps were textbook and she had a musicality and expression that fit perfectly with her tango program and music. That and I think anyone with a soul wanted to give the girl a hug in the kiss and cry.

Anyways, that’s all for this week’s Throwback Thursday. Next week will be the last Throwback Thursday post until the next Olympics in Pyeongchang, 2018.

Ok, seriously, with all the hype and overscoring that follows Patrick Chan, you’d think that you’d be seeing him everywhere. In fact, I’m surprised that he’s not the one getting his own TV show. In any case, I actually haven’t seen any ads, for Chan, on TV or on billboards at all this season, which I find infinitely strange. (As you may know, I’ve already done a “On the Street” post for Tessa and Scott – link here.)

However, I was getting a coffee before going to the symphony at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto when I saw this ad on I think, Wellington Street.

An interesting coincidence is that I was going to watch a performance of the Bacchanale from Samson et Dalila (my favourite piece of classical music) that night – a piece used in Meryl Davis & Charlie White’s breakthrough program. Dun dun dun. Oh well, I love the bacchanale and I don’t really care who skates to it. That and there were other pieces of great music that night, including an orchestral version of Claire de Lune and Wagner’s overture to Rienzi. So much beautiful music…

Have you seen any ads for figure skaters in your country? Link me to a picture in the comments or via Twitter (@LanternBell) and I’ll feature it on a post! (I’ll give you credit, of course!)

This is to let you know that there are 10 days left until the Sochi Olympics officially begin! In 10 days, all our athletes will be competing for this:

While we’re waiting, here are some dates that us figure skating fans will want to mark in our calendars. All times are in local time in Sochi. If you want to figure out what this is in your time, consult this link here. Also, check your local TV station for broadcast schedules.

Look out, Meryl Davis, you’re not the only Disney princess gliding about in the skating world! So far at The Rinkside Cafe, I’ve already done a post on Disney Princesses (who look like Meryl Davis) and a post on the elegant Kiira Korpi. However, while listening to some songs from Disney’s new movie, Frozen, a thought came to me…

Some pictures have been flipped so that faces were facing the same way.

Here is Elsa, one of the main characters in Frozen:

Kiira Korpi looks a little like Elsa with her hair in a bun but the resemblance is most striking when you see this picture:

Someone needs to Photoshop a braid into this picture. Or see if Kiira is willing to cosplay as Elsa for us.

But then, I thought, Frozen is a sisters movie and it would be nice if we could have an Anna as well as an Elsa look-alike. I couldn’t quite find a perfect look-alike as I’ve never met or seen anyone with Anna’s face shape. Well, maybe Lily Cole but she’s not a figure skater so in the end, I thought the closest Anna look-alike I could find is Ashley Wagner with the streaks in her hair.

Anna:

Ashley Wagner:

Well, I tried.

Do you have any look-alike suggestions for Anna? (And did you like Frozen?) Or just in general? Let me know in the comments~!

With the European Championships over and the Four Continents competition pretty much over, more Olympic teams are being announced. So far, I’ve done a post on the Olympic teams for Japan, Canada and the U.S. With Russia and China, I’d say that we’ve pretty much named all the heavy hitters in figure skating. Team Russia has recently named their Olympic team with one huge (though maybe not totally unexpected surprise) while Team China seems to have been named ages ago but it’s hard to find an official source. My Chinese isn’t the best and it takes a long time for me to decipher a paragraph but a few readers and reliable friends have chipped in with some info and their names match up with each other so I’ll take it that they are correct unless someone tells me otherwise with a reliable source.

Without further ado, here are the figure skaters representing Russia at the Olympics…

Men

Evgeni Plushenko

A surprise nomination as most people thought that Maxim Kovtun was going to Sochi. Some thought that he may compete only in the team event but that isn’t allowed. (Some friends have sarcastically noted that he might mysteriously get “injured” after the team event, thus letting Kovtun take his place in the individual event. Either way, there will be an abundance of windmill arms.) Plushy is old for a figure skater and he did lose to Kovtun at Nationals, however he is a legend and I have to give him props for competing at age 31. I wouldn’t be surprised if he pulled out a quad or two in Sochi.

Ladies

Adelina Sotnikova
Julia Lipnitskaia

With a 1-2 finish at Euros this year, they were the obvious choice despite the depth in ladies skating in Russia right now.

Moving on, here are the skaters representing China at this year’s Winter Olympics…

Men

Han Yan

Ladies

Kexin Zhang
Zijun Li

I think Li’s nomination wasn’t a surefire thing for a while since her slot was supposed to be tba. Li did not compete at Nationals due to injury and supposedly puberty is not treating her well. However, with her bronze at 4CC, I think her placement in the Olympic team is quite secure.

Pairs

Qing Pang & Jian Tong
Peng Cheng & Hao Zhang

I feel a little sad for Wenjing Sui & Han Cong who were battling for the second spot with Cheng & Zhang. Sui & Han aren’t terribly polished but they have big tricks which make them fun to watch. Still, I’m so happy for Cheng & Zhang. They’ve come a long way since last season and for a relatively new pair, they’re so well put together and they have such great choreography this season.

Ice Dance

Xintong Huang & Xun Zheng

And that is it for Olympic team announcements! What do you think of the teams? Was there a skater you thought should’ve been chosen? Let me know in the comments!

Pairs skating is an exciting discipline with its tall lifts, huge tricks and blazing chemistry between partners. In terms of the skating, there are a lot of elements in pairs skating that we don’t see anywhere else. For this Skating 101 post, we’ll be talking about these moves that take our breath away.

In my Skating 101 post on jumps, I featured a video that helped viewers figure out how to tell all the jumps apart. What I might not have mentioned is that in figure skating, partners are required to do side by side jumps in which partners have to jump, as you guessed it, side by side. Partners are expected to be in perfect unison throughout the entire jump. In pairs skating, we also see throw jumps (also mentioned in the Skating 101 jump post) where the man assists the lady in a jump by throwing her in the air. The lady is expected to land the jump smoothly despite being thrown a pretty big distance off the ice. There’s nothing else I can really say about this but here is a great interactive page on throw jumps by ESPN featuring Marissa Castelli & Simon Shnapir.

In my Skating 101 spins post, I talked about Side by Side Spins and Pairs Spins already so check out the post (links at the end of this post) in case you don’t remember what they are.

Now, onto some new elements only seen in pairs skating!

Death Spirals

A death spiral is when the man swings his partner in a circle while acting as a pivot. Death spirals differ by their entries (whether the lady is facing forward or backwards) and the edges (inside or outside). The video above shows the four different types of death spiral. Look carefully at whether the lady is rotating forward or backwards and the edge of her skate that’s on the ice.

In a death spiral, the team should enter smoothly into their respective positions and not lose speed throughout the entire element.

Pairs Lifts

In both pairs and ice dancing, there are lifts but the lifts of each discipline differ on one fundamental aspect: pairs lifts are usually done overhead while it is illegal to do overhead lifts in ice dance. There are many different positions for pairs lifts as well as their own variations. Here is a link to a page describing the various different lift positions in pairs skating.

Ideally, lifts should be done effortlessly and any transitions between positions should be done smoothly. The man should not lose speed as he glides on the ice with his partner. At the same time, partners can make the lift even more difficult by having many changes of positions or a complicated entry or exit from the lift.

Twist Lifts

The twist lift is a very difficult lift in which the man throws his partner up in the air in a horizontal position. The lady then does a specific number of rotations in the air before she is caught by her partner, still up in the air. Often, we hear announcers say that such team has done a triple twist, which means that the lady rotated three times in the air. Triple twists are standard in the upper echelons of pairs skating nowadays though some young skaters (especially the Chinese), are attempting quadruple twists. Ideally, twists should be high and the rotations should be fully completed before the lady comes back to her partner. All of this must be done while looking effortless. Pairs can make the twist even more difficult by having the lady put her arm over her head.

For the science or physics of figure skating and twists, here is a video. Twists are mentioned at the very end of the short video. Who knew that all that work on parabolas in calculus class could apply to figure skating?

Pairs Spiral Sequence

In ladies skating, one of the most iconic elements is the spiral where the lady glides on one foot with her free leg above waist level. (Michelle Kwan’s arabesque spiral always makes me a little teary these days.) In pairs, both partners must be in spiral positions, though the positions need not to be the same. Often, partners are attached to each other while doing the spiral sequence.

Mirror Pairs

This isn’t a pairs element but rather, it’s a name for a special kind of pairs team. Similar to left and right-handedness, some skaters rotate clockwise while others rotate counter-clockwise in their spins and jumps. (Most skaters rotate counter-clockwise.) For most pairs teams, partners rotate in the same direction but for some teams, like Kristi Yamaguchi before she became a singles skater and Rudy Galindo, partners rotate in opposite directions. As a result, the goal for mirror pairs is to do their jumping and spinning elements in unison to look like mirror images of one another.

If you have any other questions or comments about pairs skating, let me know in the comments! I’d love to hear from you! As well, feel free to suggest any future topics for Skating 101!